ReadingRate · What's new · 2026-08-13
The 100 best books, ranked — with difficulty scores
ReadingRate's 100 best books is ranked on literary-regard data — canonical standing, critical acclaim and influence — rather than user star ratings, and every entry carries a difficulty score so you can pick a great book you'll actually finish. Filtering by country, author gender, era or difficulty now returns a full hundred drawn from the whole catalogue rather than the leftovers of the curated list.
Available on web.
Any best-books list is an argument, and most hide theirs. This one states its basis: measurable literary regard, which is why it reads more like a university reading list than a bestseller chart.
The difficulty scores are what make it usable rather than aspirational. Sorting acclaimed books by how hard they are turns a list of things you ought to have read into a list of things you could start tonight.
Fourteen filtered lists are published in full, including the best books by women and by country from Italy to Japan.
What it can't do
- Regard data reflects the canon's own history of attention, which recorded some traditions and some writers far more thoroughly than others. The filtered lists inherit that bias and say so.
- Filtered lists rank on regard across the catalogue, so their order is a data ranking rather than a curated one.
- Only filters with at least a hundred scored books are published; thinner ones are held back rather than shipped short.
Questions people ask
- What are the best books of all time?
- By literary regard — canonical standing, critical acclaim and influence — the top of ReadingRate's list runs to Hamlet, Don Quixote, Ulysses, War and Peace and The Divine Comedy, each with a difficulty score.
- Can I see the best books by women, or from a particular country?
- Yes. Fourteen filtered lists are published in full — the best books by women, and by country for the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Russia, Germany, Italy, Japan, Ireland, Canada, Spain, Poland, India and China. Each is a full hundred, ranked on literary regard, with difficulty scores.